The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

The Spy Who Loved Us 21
known as Ho Chi Minh. When Phan Chu Trinh died in 1926,
thousands of people swarmed into the streets in Saigon and
Hanoi, demanding an end to French colonial occupation. An’s
father helped organize these demonstrations, and An followed
his father’s example in the 1950s, when he too used the funeral
of a Vietnamese patriot to launch a series of street demonstrations
and strikes.
When we meet, An and I usually sit in his living room.
Sometimes we walk to the bookshelves that line the back of the
room. One day An takes me behind the shelves into a narrow
corridor where his family altar is located. It holds the usual
sticks of incense and bowls of fruit and jumbled collection of
photos which honor the dead. Vietnam is a country that celebrates
death days instead of birthdays. “The Vietnamese are not
Buddhists,” An says. “They are animists. The religion they practice
is ancestor worship. This is why the Têt holiday is so important
to the Vietnamese. It is the occasion when you invite the
souls of the dead to come back to visit the living.”
“We believe we have three souls,” An says, “spiritual, sentimental,
and material. The spiritual soul distinguishes humans
from animals. The sentimental soul comes from the heart. The
material soul comes from the abdomen. It explains why humans
are bad, why we kill people and are corrupted.
“When you die, you report to the emperor of hell. If you
have committed too many crimes, you are forced to stay there.
In any case, you will stay in hell for three days after your burial.
Then your family comes to visit your grave with a black
chicken. If the chicken cries, it is let out of its cage and allowed
to run free. Called ‘the opening of the grave,’ this releases
the sentimental soul. You can use a black dog for this ritual, but
it costs more. If the dog returns to your home, it will bring
your sentimental soul with it. We celebrate this event by placing
a photo of the dead person on the family altar.”
Placed in the center of the altar is the photograph of An’s
grandfather, showing him dressed in a tight-fitting tunic and